bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/842393; this version posted November 14, 2019. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. 1 Species-level microbiome composition of activated sludge - introducing the MiDAS 3 2 ecosystem-specific reference database and taxonomy 3 Marta Nierychlo, Kasper Skytte Andersen, Yijuan Xu, Nick Green, Mads Albertsen, Morten S. 4 Dueholm, Per Halkjær Nielsen. 5 Center for Microbial Communities, Department of Chemistry and Bioscience, Aalborg University, 6 Aalborg, Denmark. 7 *Correspondence to: Per Halkjær Nielsen, Center for Microbial Communities, Department of 8 Chemistry and Bioscience, Aalborg University, Fredrik Bajers Vej 7H, 9220 Aalborg, Denmark; 9 Phone: +45 9940 8503; Fax: Not available; E-mail:
[email protected] 10 Abstract 11 The function of microbial communities in wastewater treatment systems and anaerobic digesters is 12 dictated by the physiological activity of its members and complex interactions between them. Since 13 functional traits are often conserved at low taxonomic ranks (genus, species, strain), the development 14 of high taxonomic resolution and reliable classification is the first crucial step towards understanding 15 the role of microbes in any ecosystem. Here we present MiDAS 3, a comprehensive 16S rRNA gene 16 reference database based on high-quality full-length sequences derived from activated sludge and 17 anaerobic digester systems. The MiDAS 3 taxonomy proposes unique provisional names for all 18 microorganisms down to species level.